Thursday, May 12, 2016

Writing Ritual

You sometimes get up in the morning with swollen eyes, half asleep and half conscious. You struggle with the alarm and snooze it many times. Eventually your own conscience asks you to get up. You have to, else it would get late. You have to get up and write. That is what you do everyday and you can’t miss it. It is part of your routine like brushing your teeth. You tell yourself. You want to become a writer, a successful one. Everyone tell you to continue writing and to continue editing. Doesn't matter if you are not publishing, does not matter if most of the publishers are not even replying to your emails, does not matter if you can’t cover up your rent , you should continue writing and editing. You should not give up or do less of it. Do not worry, things will work out, they say. 
You drag yourself from the bed to the washroom, you do your morning ritual and then you look outside the window to see what kind of day it is. But for you it does not matter. As first, you have to sit and write for hours. Maybe a story, or an assignment or a memoir or some blog post. You have to sit at the desk and take out your computer or maybe you can write with a pen and paper today. There are days when you edit your previous work. These days are even more difficult as you have to cut a lot of your writing, in their language you kill your sweethearts. When you are done editing, you don’t feel that you did something substantial or you created something new. You might have done something, you are not sure. 
You get some breakfast and a coffee in between. It breaks the routine and brings you back to real life. To the almost empty kitchen and to the almost empty milk cartons. It reminds you of the bills and of the grocery shopping that is pending from last week. Once you worked and you never had to think about expenditures or money so much. But now you write and very rarely you make any money. As you finish your breakfast, you bring yourself out of these thoughts and try to focus on the story you were working on. You like the arc of the story but you feel the characters miss something. They need to be more real and then you think about the people in your life. Maybe you can take some inspiration from one of them. They say that characters are mostly inspired by real people in your life. You think about your parents, grandparents, neighbours, friends, colleagues, ex boyfriends, plumber, and the building super. You pick out some traits from your friend’s girlfriend and develop your character a little more. You think of new stories and themes. You think of creating thrilling and extraordinary stories. You think about various deep human emotions and you decide that after you are done with the writing, you will read stories on Granta. 
You think of the number of word you wrote yesterday. You count the number of words you have written today. You compare them with the number of words that famous authors write everyday. You get disappointed and you stop thinking about it. You tell yourself that you will reach there. Your grammar is not perfect. You need to do more revisions. You think you do more of telling than of showing and you need to fix that. You rewrite sentences to fix the grammar. You rewrite the sentences to show things rather than tell. You read the whole thing again. You read the whole thing out loud. You enjoy it. It was more engaging than before. But you still could not fix one important part of the story which is coming out to be a little boring. You are still not happy. You have spent hours and now you are aching for some sun. You glance the whole thing once more. You look at the word count. You revise the different things you have written in the past in your head. You try to pacify yourself. You check your emails. Maybe somebody replied to the manuscripts you sent last week. You find there is nothing. You shut your laptop. You close your notebook and replace the cap on the pen. You take your jacket and you walk out of the house

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